Yesterday at Lamu, President William Ruto and businessman Aliko Dangote broke ground on a $16 billion oil refinery designed to process 700,000 barrels a day, with a 1,000- megawatt power plant attached and half its electricity promised to the Kenyan grid.
The day before, at a Nairobi Securities Exchange investor session, Mr Dangote said his Nigerian refinery’s public offer was not really about raising money, but about letting ordinary Africans share in the wealth. He also pledged that the East African refinery would one day list in Nairobi.
In our founders’ forum, someone asked the obvious question. Investment experts, please advise us founders on how to navigate this initial public offer (IPO).
A seasoned banker answered with rare clarity. There is no IPO here for you, he said. This is project finance, the territory of investment and commercial banks. Founders can be involved, but in the supply chain: all the goods and services needed to bring the project to life.
He was right, and he pointed at the real story. This column is not about the IPO. It is about the train.
Call it the founder’s train. A great enterprise is a locomotive, and a locomotive is only as valuable as the wagons it pulls. One success, properly built, carries hundreds of others behind it.
Look at what flows out of Dangote’s Lagos refinery. Fuels, yes. But also polypropylene, the raw material for packaging, fibres, ropes, furniture and car parts. Sulphur. Carbon black. Every one of those streams is a wagon: a business someone can build. Then add everything a project of this size consumes before a single barrel is refined.
Steel, cement, transport, catering, security, housing, welding, inspection, training, insurance, legal work. Officials expect tens of thousands of jobs. The real number depends on who shows up to build the wagons.
We have seen this train before. In its early years, Safaricom built an army of local enterprises around it: dealers, agents, developers, distributors. Their growth was treated as a measure of the company’s own. Many Kenyan fortunes began as a wagon behind that locomotive.
The question now is who will couple onto this one. There are three kinds of wagons. Kenyan firms that step up and become the next big corporates. Entrepreneurs who build new skills and new businesses around the plant. Or wagons we import from global partners because we could not execute. That third kind is already on the rails: an Indian state engineering firm has won a contract worth more than $450 million to manage engineering and construction.
The strongest counter-argument is fair. This is one project, with real doubts. Crude supply is uncertain. A court has ordered parts of the site preserved pending a case by local residents. Politicians are already asking who will own what. Founders who bet their businesses on a promise can be ruined by a delay.
True. The answer is not to bet on it blindly. It is to prepare for it deliberately. And there is something worth noticing about the politics. A founder at this scale, from another country, is embraced at a presidential podium. Too often, when one of our own grows that tall, the welcome is colder. A pan-African founder does not threaten local officeholders, so the door opens. Let us hope that door stays open for the next Kenyan who knocks on it.
Consider how a founder at this scale thinks. Strategically, he integrates backwards until nobody can hold him hostage, building his own power plant, jetty and supply. In mindset, he told Nairobi that Africa can no longer afford baby steps.
Emotionally, he has absorbed strikes, lawsuits and sabotage without leaving the room. Socially, he wants ten million shareholders, because a champion owned by his own people is harder to uproot. Spiritually, he has said it plainly: nobody lives forever, so the legacy must.
A wagon needs three things to move: a coupling, a track and a timetable. Certification is the coupling. Finance is the track. Readiness is the timetable. Miss any one and the train leaves without you.
For Kenyan founders, the work starts now. Map the value chain before the tenders open. Get certified to the standards a refinery demands. Form consortia, because no single small firm can supply a project this size. Train the welders, inspectors and technicians today, not in 2029.
To the next generation who will see this as their moment: build well, build together, and build big. The billion-shilling businesses of the next decade may be the wagons coupled on this week.
The locomotive makes the headline. The wagons make the economy. One founder’s success is a train. Everyone else decides whether to be a wagon or a spectator.